Ay Ay family: victims of New Labour's eagerness to lock up children of refugees A NEW book by outspoken academic Allyson Pollock lifts the lid on the scale and pace of the government's privatisation of a growing share of the NHS.
Professor Pollock's School of Public Policy at University College London has been prominent in challenging the Private Finance Initiative and the more recent policy of Foundation Hospitals.
Her book opens up with a hard-hitting Who's Who of the big-hitters from the private sector who have been welcomed in to key policy roles and around the NHS by Tony Blair and his ministers.
Chapters deal with the market-style policies introduced first by the Tories and now again by New Labour, the extent of the privatisation of services including almost all long-term care of older people, and the inroads that have been made into primary care.
It's a fascinating read - if a little depressing for trade unionists who have been on the receiving end of so many of the attacks.
"Hurry, let's finish before
we're made redundant" rebuilding the controversial "internal market" system ushered in by Margaret Thatcher's "reforms" in the early 1990s, is intended to bring back competition between Trusts, and to ensure that in Thatcher's famous phrase "the money follows the patient".
Some Foundation Trusts with below average running costs had been eager to begin this system early, since it would funnel increased cash into their budgets: but other Trusts, especially specialist hospitals with higher than average costs, face years of heavy handed cost cutting if they are not to be pushed deep into cash crisis.
As the trouble-shooters start measuring up assets for disposal, recommending which services the Trust should drop, and sizing up the workforce for redundancies, it is clear that Bradford's problems today will be those of many more Foundations and other Trusts in the months and years ahead.
New Labour's reconstruction of the "internal market" goes even further than Thatcher ever dreamed: Primary Care Trusts will be obliged to offer patients a "choice" of providers including private hospitals, while GP Funholding TCLUENS under the guise of "practice based commissioning", and the private sector gears up for the wholesale purchase of NS waiting list operations from private Treatment Centres.
In 1997 Blair warned we had just "10 days to save the NHS: but who will protect this most popular public service from a further round of privatisation and wasteful market-style reforms? ALLYSON M POLLOCK pic • NHS plc, The Privatisation of Our Health Care, Allyson M Pollock, Verso £15.99. Mid Yorko